Pablo Picasso

Painter, draftsman, sculptor, printmaker, photographer, ceramicist, designer, playwright, and poet, Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881–1973) contributed peerless innovations to the visual culture of the twentieth century. He created several of the great masterpieces of modernism, including Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and Guernica (1937), co-invented collage and Cubism, designed groundbreaking sets and costumes for the theater, coined the term “surrealism,” and invented assembled sculpture (assemblage).

Born in Málaga, Spain, on the Mediterranean coast, Picasso began painting and drawing under the tutelage of his father, José Ruiz Blasco, himself a painter and an art school instructor. Picasso proved to be a child prodigy, achieving a remarkable academic facility at a young age, and studied formally at art schools in La Coruña, Barcelona, and Madrid. He began to visit Paris in 1901, settling there permanently in 1904. Picasso was influenced by the Modernisme movement in Barcelona and by Post-Impressionism and the Fauves in Paris, yet developed variations distinctly his own. 

Picasso was widely exhibited during his lifetime and continues to be so posthumously. He died in Mougins, France, in 1973, leaving no will. He was married twice: first to Olga Khokhlova in 1917, and then to Jacqueline Roque in 1961. In addition, he had partners who served as important muses to his oeuvre: Fernande Olivier (1904–12), Marie-Thérèse Walter (1927–c. 1940), Dora Maar (1936–c. 1945), and Françoise Gilot (1943–53). He had five children: Paul (with Khokhlova), Maya (with Walter), Claude (with Gilot), Paloma (with Gilot), and a stepdaughter, Cathy (Roque’s daughter from a previous marriage). The settlement of Picasso’s estate in 1979 allowed for the establishment of the Musée national Picasso, Paris.

Source: Gagosian